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Created Nov 28, 2009 12:55PM PST • Edited Aug 01, 2015 02:30AM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Great 4.0

   Philippe Petit’s “Artistic Crime of the Century” – tightrope walking the Twin Towers – comes joyously alive in this revelatory documentary. Merry pranksters, Petit and his collaborators embody 60s joie de vivre that’s as life-affirming as a skywalker is death-defying.

   The movie provides ample drama, notwithstanding its well known happy ending. Director James Marsh first shows Petit’s less famous walks between the towers of Notre Dame de Paris and the Sydney Harbour Bridge, all the while cleverly slipping in details about the conception, planning and execution of what Petit referred to as “le coup” – spanning the Twin Towers.

   One quibble: This ‘08 movie doesn’t even nod to the World Trade Center’s ‘01 annihilation, the nearby photo notwithstanding. An understandable omission in such a joyous undertaking, still, shouldn’t a documentary about a legendary adventure mention that one of it’s participants was assassinated at age 29?

4. Acting

   Great 4.0

   Petit is a joyous, impish performance artiste, his supporting cast a lovable band of misfits.

   The Twin Towers get no cast credit, but deserve it. Derided as architecturally charmless monstrosities when built, it took a crazed Frenchman for the world to see them as lovable.

5. Male Stars Great 4.0

6. Female Stars Great 4.0

7. Female Costars Great 4.0

8. Male Costars Great 4.0

10. Film

    Great 4.0

    Cleverly constructed from contemporaneous interviews, archival footage and drama reconstructions, Man on Wire shows Petit and his band of prankster enablers in their full anarchic glory.

11. Direction Very Good 3.5

12. Play Really Great 4.5

13. Music Great 4.0

14. Visuals Perfect 5.0
15. Content

16. Edge

    Tame 1.2

    Petit briefly and tastefully reenacts an indulgence with a groupie. Ah, fame. So seductive.

17. Sex Titillating 1.6

18. Violence Gentle 1.0

19. Rudeness Polite 1.0

21. Reality

    Natural 1.0

    9/11 looms over the movie like a spectral presence.

    The World Trade Center pit is shown shortly after the opening credits, an image now associated with the Al-Qaeda created grave site. But no, here it’s the Towers aborning back in the late 60s. Weird. And sad, so very, very sad.

    Finally, as Petit’s Pranksters detail their cut rate subterfuge in casing the World Trade Center and sneaking their extensive gear up the Towers, one can’t help lament how tolerance of harmless anarchy is one more casualty of Islamist terrorism. Thus terrorism is a crime against tolerance as much as against humanity.

22. Circumstantial Natural 1.0

23. Biological Natural 1.0

24. Physical Natural 1.0